How to safely reduce a 237 GB state.vscdb with only 46 GB free?

Support Help
,
1

Title: How to safely reduce a 237 GB state.vscdb with only 46 GB free?

I’m using Cursor 3.28.7 on Windows.

My state.vscdb is approximately 237 GB, and I have only 46 GB of free disk space.

I have no external drive.

Is there an officially supported way to reduce the database size without losing active Agent conversations, checkpoints, or workspace history, and without requiring hundreds of GB of temporary space?

I have not run GC, VACUUM, or manual database modifications.

6

At ~237 GB with only ~46 GB free, there’s no supported way to shrink it in place. The command that actually reclaims space (Developer: GC Agent KV Blobs in the Command Palette) rewrites the whole database and needs roughly double its size in free disk, so it won’t run until there’s much more space free. The growth itself is an issue we’re tracking.

Given your constraints, I’d do this:

  1. Save anything you want to keep - open those chats, use the ... menu and choose Export. The files are tiny.
  2. If you can free up (or add) enough disk, or point Cursor’s data folder at a drive with more room via the --user-data-dir <path> launch flag, then run Developer: GC Agent KV Blobs and let it finish. This keeps your history.
  3. If you can’t free that much space, the only way to reclaim it now is to reset the database. This removes the chat/agent history stored in it and signs you out (your login lives in the same file). Fully quit Cursor, then in %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\globalStorage\ rename (don’t delete) state.vscdb, state.vscdb.backup, state.vscdb-wal, and state.vscdb-shm to .old. Relaunch, sign back in, confirm everything works, then delete the .old files. Renaming instead of deleting gives you a rollback.